LuisTeodoro.com

A “Media Summit” last weekend has managed to solicit the grudging admission by the media practitioners in attendance, most of them from print, that the mass media have responsibilities to the public they serve. What’s even more surprising, they actually asked how these responsibilities can be met!
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There is hardly any arguing with the main points raised by the Citizens Committee on the National Crisis (CCNC). The problem is in the “solution” it’s proposing.

The CCNC is the group that has called on the Armed Forces to “temporarily” take over the government and stop the holding of the May elections. Those elections, said the CCNC, “are going to be the dirtiest and the most dishonest since 1945…”
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The law is clear enough. Although it doesn’t say that a candidate has to have a college degree as the Gucci’d and pedigreed set wishes, among the few qualifications it specifies is that a candidate for president must be a natural-born Filipino.
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“Low-key” was the phrase the newspapers used to describe it, and low-key it indeed was. There was only a mass at 6:30 a.m. at the EDSA shrine, where President Arroyo’s upbeat remarks—about her administration, of course—were nearly ignored by the media—and the usual flag-raising ceremony. Only Manila Bishop Socrates Villegas’ sermon on the politicians’ betrayal of EDSA in fact made the headlines the next day; without it the event would have passed only with the barest notice.
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She was a farmer’s daughter who completed a bachelor’s degree at the University of the East and then worked her way to a law degree in another downtown Manila university. After passing the bar she practiced law in Manila, but soon returned to her native Mindoro to be with her aging parents. She became a municipal councilor of her birthplace Naujan, Mindoro Oriental, in 1998, and then successfully ran for vice mayor in 2001.
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Administration candidate for senator Mar Roxas was there, but so were the opposition’s Jamby Madrigal and Didangen Dilangalen. So was Frank Chavez, who’s running as an independent candidate for senator, and who emphasized his UP activist roots.
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Unless the Supreme Court intervenes, the execution of death convicts Roderick Licayan and Roberto Lara, who are scheduled to die by lethal injection on January 30, is likely to go through.
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